FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES
§ 1. Holland
Holland, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the
seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth, though
without putting forth much native response. After her desperate wars
with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically ruled, turned on
the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres than to the
problems which had begun to exercise so much of English thought. It
was an age of "retrogression and weakness." [1493] Elizabeth Wolff,
née Bekker, one of the most famous of the numerous Dutch women-writers
of the century (1738-1804), is notable for her religious as well
as for her political liberalism; [1494] but her main activity was
in novel-writing; and there are few other signs of freethinking
tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was impossible, however,
that the influences at work in the neighbouring lands should be shut
out; and if Holland did not produce innovating books she printed many
throughout the century.
In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of
"Juan di Posos," wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels,
something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof
had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on
Earth, which was at most Spinozistic. [1495] Even as late as 1714
a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but
henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle,
begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have
made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country,
which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of
northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in
the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English
thought and literature, especially the former; [1496] and, besides
reprinting many of the French deists' works and translating some of
the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian
Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736,
left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking
cast to be posthumously published.
The German traveller Alberti, [1497] citing the London Magazine,
1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works
in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were
sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous
Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, "by a friend to truth,"
published in English in 1732. [1498] It is a remarkable treatise,
being a hardy justification of suicide, "composed for the consolation
of the unhappy," from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years
earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract
entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher
newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second
pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of
1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically
treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists
usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano's Recueil des pièces
curieuses sur les matières les plus interessants, published with his
name at Rotterdam in 1736, [1499] includes a translation of Swift's
ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregée de la
profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English
translation. [1500] Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative
thoroughness of his rationalism. [1501] In the Recueil he speaks of
deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having
always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal
Germs, movement, or universal soul. [1502]
In 1737 was published in French a small mystification consisting
of a Sermon prêché dans la grande Assemblée des Quakers de
Londres, par le fameux Frère E. E., and another little tract,
La Religion Muhamedane comparée à la païenne de l'Indostan,
par Ali-Ebn-Omar. "E. E." stood for Edward Elwall, a well-known
Unitarian of the time, who, as we saw, was tried at Stafford
Assizes in 1726 for publishing a Unitarian treatise, and who in
1742 published another, entitled The Supernatural Incarnation of
Jesus Christ proved to be false ... and that our Lord Jesus Christ
was the real son of Joseph and Mary. The two tracts are both by
Passerano, and are on deistic lines, the text of the Sermon being
(in English) "The Religion of the Gospel is the true Original
Religion of Reason and Nature." The proposition is of course
purely ethical in its bearing.
The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing
liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the
conditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as
prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in medicine
and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century did Dutch
scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.
§ 2. The Scandinavian States
1. Traces of new rationalistic life are to be seen in the Scandinavian
countries at least as early as the times of Descartes. There, as
elsewhere, the Reformation had been substantially a fiscal or economic
revolution, proceeding on various lines. In Denmark the movement,
favoured by the king, began among the people; the nobility rapidly
following, to their own great profit; and finally Christian III, who
ruled both Denmark and Norway, acting with the nobles, suppressed
Catholic worship, and confiscated to the crown the "castles,
fortresses, and vast domains of the prelates." [1503] In Sweden
the king, Gustavus Vasa, took the initiative, moved by sore need of
funds, and a thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical temper, [1504] the clergy
having supported the Danish rule which he threw off. The burghers and
peasants promptly joined him against the clergy and nobles, enabling
him to confiscate the bishops' castles and estates, as was done in
Denmark; and he finally secured himself with the nobles by letting
them reclaim lands granted by their ancestors to monasteries. [1505]
His anti-feudal reforms having stimulated new life in many ways,
further evolution followed.
In Sweden the stimulative reign of Gustavus Vasa was followed by a
long period of the strife which everywhere trod on the heels of the
Reformation. The second successor of Gustavus, his son John, had
married a daughter of the Catholic Sigismund of Poland, and sought
to restore her religion to power, causing much turmoil until her
death, whereafter he abandoned the cause. His Catholic son Sigismund
recklessly renewed the effort, and was deposed in consequence; John's
brother Charles becoming king. In Denmark, meanwhile, Frederick II
(d. 1588) had been a bigoted champion of Lutheranism, expelling a
professor of Calvinistic leanings on the Eucharist, and refusing a
landing to the Calvinists who fled from the Netherlands. On the other
hand he patronized and pensioned Tycho Brahé, who, until driven into
banishment by a court cabal during the minority of Christian IV,
did much for astronomy, though unable to accept Copernicanism.
In 1611 there broke out between Sweden and Denmark the sanguinary
two-years' "War of Calmar," their common religion availing nothing to
avert strife. Thereafter Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, as Protestant
champion in the Thirty Years' War, in succession to Christian IV of
Denmark, fills the eye of Europe till his death in 1632; eleven years
after which event Sweden and Denmark were again at war. In 1660 the
latter country, for lack of goodwill between nobles and commoners,
underwent a political revolution whereby its king, whose predecessors
had held the crown on an elective tenure, became absolute, and set
up a hereditary line. The first result was a marked intellectual
stagnation. "Divinity, law, and philosophy were wholly neglected;
surgery was practised only by barbers; and when Frederick IV and his
queen required medical aid, no native physician could be found to whom
it was deemed safe to entrust the cure of the royal patients.... The
only name, after Tycho Brahé, of which astronomy can boast, is that
of Peter Horrebow, and with him the cultivation of the science became
extinct." [1506]
2. For long, the only personality making powerfully for culture was
Holberg, [1507] certainly a host in himself. Of all the writers of his
age, the only one who can be compared with him in versatility of power
is Voltaire, whom he emulated as satirist, dramatist, and historian;
but all his dramatic genius could not avail to sustain against the
puritanical pietism which then flourished, the Danish drama of which
he was the fecund creator. After producing a brilliant series of plays
(1722-1727) he had to witness the closing of the Copenhagen Theatre,
and take to general writing, historical and didactic. In 1741 he
produced in Latin his famous Subterranean Journey of Nicolas Klimius,
[1508] one of the most widely famous performances of its age. [1509]
He knew English, and must have been influenced by Swift's Gulliver's
Travels, which his story frequently recalls. The hero catastrophically
reaches a "subterranean" planet, with another social system, and
peopled by moving trees and civilized and socialized animals. With
the tree-people, the Potuans, the tale deals at some length, giving
a chapter on their religion, [1510] after the manner of Tyssot de
Patot in Jacques Massé. They are simple deists, knowing nothing of
Christianity; and the author makes them the mouthpieces of criticisms
upon Christian prayers, Te Deums, and hymn-singing in general. They
believe in future recompenses, but not in providential government of
this life; and at various points they improve upon the current ethic
of Christendom. [1511]
There is a trace of the tone of Frederick alike in the eulogy of
tolerance and in the intimation that anyone who disputes about the
character of the deity and the properties of spirits or souls is
"condemned to phlebotomy" and to be detained in the general hospital
(nosocomium). [1512] It was probably by way of precaution that in
the closing paragraph of the chapter the Potuans are alleged to
maintain that, though their creed "seemed mere natural religion,
it was all revealed in a book which was sent from the sky some
centuries ago"; but the precaution is slight, as they are declared to
have practically no dogmas at all. It is thus easy to read between
the lines of the declaration of Potuan orthodoxy: "Formerly our
ancestors contented themselves to live in natural religion alone;
but experience has shown that the mere light of nature does not
suffice, and that its precepts are effaced in time by the sloth
and negligence of some and the philosophic subtleties of others,
so that nothing can arrest freethinking (libertatem cogitandi) or
keep it within just bounds. Thence came depravation; and therefore
it was that God had chosen to give them a written law." [1513] Such
a confutation of "the error of those who pretend that a revelation is
unnecessary" must have given more entertainment to those in question
than satisfaction to the defenders of the faith. But a general tone
of levity and satire, maintained at the expense of various European
nations, England included, [1514] together with his popularity as a
dramatist, saved Holberg from the imputation of heresy. His satire
reached and was realized by the cultured few alone: the multitude
was quite unaffected; and during the reign of Christian VI all
intellectual efforts beyond the reign of science were subjected to
rigorous control. [1515] As a culture force, Protestantism had failed
in the north lands as completely as Catholicism in the south.
3. In Sweden, meantime, there had occurred some reflex of the
intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century
there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the famous
Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested in the
objections of "Jews, heathens, and philosophers against Christian
doctrine"; [1516] and her invitation of Descartes to her court
(1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the
revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years' War
in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable personality,
unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature intelligence;
and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for herself. In
the course of a few years, the new spirit had gone so far as to
make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish court;
[1517] and the Queen's adoption of Romanism, for which she prepared
by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of revulsion
from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she had been led
by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after Descartes's
death. [1518] It has been confidently asserted that she really cared
for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of conformity
for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views. [1519] It is
certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings. But
her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind which
could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catholicism
the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-framed for
the discipline of reason. The author of the Histoire des intrigues
galantes de la reine Christine de Suède (1697), who seems to have
been one of her suite, insists that while she "loved bigots no more
than atheists," [1520] and although her religion had been shaken in
her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all
Catholic observances; and that once, looking at the portrait of her
father, she said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul,
and thanked God for having guided her aright. [1521]
Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance; but it is
noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declaration
that he had "greatly contributed" to her "glorious conversion" to the
Catholic faith. [1522] Whatever favour she may have shown to liberty
of thought in her youth, no important literary results could follow
in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even the
new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology. [1523] The
German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature and
Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at Lund, where he
was professor, in 1672-73), did much to establish the utilitarian and
naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work at the same time in
England; but his latent deism had no great influence even in Germany,
his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing it, although he argued
for a separation of Church and State. [1524]
4. That there was, however, in eighteenth-century Sweden a considerable
amount of unpublished rationalism may be gathered from the writings
of Emanuel Swedenborg, himself something of a freethinker in his
very supernaturalism. His frequent subacid allusions to those who
"regarded Nature instead of the divine," and "thought from science,"
[1525] tell not merely of much passive opposition to his own prophetic
claims (which he avenged by much serene malediction and the allotment
of bad quarters in the next world), but of reasoned rejection of all
Scriptural claims. Thus in his Sapientia Angelica de Divina Providentia
[1526] (1764) he sets himself [1527] to deal with a number of the
ways in which "the merely natural man confirms himself in favour of
Nature against God" and "comes to the conclusion that religion in
itself is nothing, but yet that it is necessary because it serves as
a restraint." Among the sources of unbelief specified are ethical
revolt alike against the Biblical narratives and against the lack
of moral government in the world; the recognition of the success of
other religions than the Christian, and of the many heresies within
that; and dissatisfaction with the Christian dogmas. As Swedenborg
sojourned much in other countries, he may be describing men other
than his countrymen; but it is very unlikely that the larger part of
his intercourse with his fellows counted for nothing in this account
of contemporary rationalism.
With his odd mixture of scripturalism and innovating dogmatism,
Swedenborg disposes of difficulties about Genesis by reducing Adam
and Eve to an allegory of the "Most Ancient Church," tranquilly
dismissing the orthodox belief by asking, "For who can suppose that
the creation of the world could have been as there described?" [1528]
His own scientific training, which had enabled him to make his notable
anticipation of the nebular theory, [1529] made it also easy for him
to reduce to allegory the text of what he nevertheless insisted on
treating as a divine revelation; and his moral sense, active where
he felt no perverting resentment of contradiction by reasoners,
[1530] made him reject the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith,
even as he did the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. On these points
he seems to have had a lead from his father, Bishop Jasper Svedberg,
[1531] as he had in his overwhelming physiological bias to subjective
vision-making. But a message which finally amounted to the oracular
propounding of a new and bewildering supernaturalism, to be taken on
authority like the old, could make for freethought only by rousing
rational reaction. It was Swedenborg's destiny to establish, in virtue
of his great power of orderly dogmatism, a new supernaturalist and
scripturalist sect, while his scientific conceptions were left for
other men to develop. In his own country, in his own day, he had
little success qua prophet, though always esteemed for his character
and his high secular competence; and he finally figured rather as a
heresiarch than otherwise. [1532]
5. According to one of Swedenborg's biographers, the worldliness of
most of the Swedish clergy in the middle of the eighteenth century so
far outwent even that of the English Church that the laity were left
to themselves; while "gentlemen disdained the least taint of religion,
and except on formal occasions would have been ashamed to be caught
church-going." [1533] But this was a matter rather of fashion than
of freethought; and there is little trace of critical life in the
period. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, doubtless,
the aristocracies and the cultured class in the Scandinavian States
were influenced like the rest of Europe by the spirit of French
freethought, [1534] which everywhere followed the vogue of the French
language and literature. Thus we find Gustavus III of Sweden, an ardent
admirer of Voltaire, defending him in company, and proposing in 1770,
before the death of his father prevented it, to make a pilgrimage to
Ferney. [1535] It is without regard to this testimony that Gustavus,
who was assassinated, is said to have died "with the fortitude
and resignation of a Christian." [1536] He was indeed flighty and
changeable, [1537] and after growing up a Voltairean was turned for a
year or two into a credulous mystic, the dupe of pseudo-Swedenborgian
charlatans; [1538] but there is small sign of religious earnestness
in his fashion of making his dying confession. [1539] Claiming at
an earlier date to believe more than Joseph II, who in his opinion
"believed in nothing at all," he makes light of their joint parade of
piety at Rome, [1540] and seems to have been at bottom a good deal
of an indifferentist. During his reign his influence on literature
fostered a measure of the spirit of freethought in belles lettres;
and in the poets J. H. Kjellgren and J. M. Bellman (both d. 1795)
there is to be seen the effect of the German Aufklärung and the
spirit of Voltaire. [1541] Their contemporary, Tomas Thoren, who
called himself Torild (d. 1812), though more of an innovator in
poetic style than in thought, wrote among other things a pamphlet
on The Freedom of the General Intelligence. But Torild's nickname,
"the mad magister," tells of his extravagance; and none of the Swedish
belletrists of that age amounted to a European influence. Finally,
in the calamitous period which followed on the assassination of
Gustavus III, all Swedish culture sank heavily. The desperate energies
of Charles XII had left his country half-ruined in 1718; and even
while Linnæus and his pupils were building up the modern science of
botany in the latter half of the century the economic exhaustion of
the people was a check on general culture. The University of Upsala,
which at one time had over 2,000 students, counted only some 500 at
the close of the eighteenth century. [1542]
6. In Denmark, on the other hand, the stagnation of nearly a hundred
years had been ended at the accession of Frederick V in 1746. [1543]
National literature, revivified by Holberg, was further advanced
by the establishment of a society of polite learning in 1763;
under Frederick's auspices Danish naturalists and scholars were sent
abroad for study; and in particular a literary expedition was sent to
Arabia. The European movement of science, in short, had gripped the
little kingdom, and the usual intellectual results began to follow,
though, as in Catholic Spain, the forces of reaction soon rallied
against a movement which had been imposed from above rather than
evolved from within.
The most celebrated northern unbeliever of the French period was
Count Struensee, who for some years (1770-72) virtually ruled Denmark
as the favourite of the young queen, the king being half-witted and
worthless. Struensee was an energetic and capable though injudicious
reformer: he abolished torture; emancipated the enslaved peasantry;
secured toleration for all sects; encouraged the arts and industry;
established freedom of the press; and reformed the finances, the
police, the law courts, and sanitation. [1544] His very reforms,
being made with headlong rapidity, made his position untenable, and
his enemies soon effected his downfall and death. The young queen,
who was not alleged to have been a freethinker, was savagely seized by
the hostile faction and put on her trial on a charge of adultery, which
being wholly unproved, the aristocratic faction proposed to try her on
a charge of drugging her husband. Only by the efforts of the British
court was she saved from imprisonment for life in a fortress, and sent
to Hanover, where, three years later, she died. She too was a reformer,
and it was on that score that she was hated by the nobles. [1545] Both
she and Struensee, in short, were the victims of a violent political
reaction. There is an elaborate account of Struensee's conversion
to Christianity in prison by the German Dr. Munter, [1546] which
makes him out by his own confession an excessive voluptuary. It is
an extremely suspicious document, exhibiting strong political bias,
and giving Struensee no credit for reforms; the apparent assumption
being that the conversion of a reprobate was of more evidential value
than that of a reputable and reflective type.
In spite of the reaction, rationalism persisted among the cultured
class. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting Denmark in 1795, noted that there
and in Norway the press was free, and that new French publications
were translated and freely discussed. The press had in fact been
freed by Struensee, and was left free by his enemies because of the
facilities it had given them to attack him. [1547] "On the subject of
religion," she added, "they are likewise becoming tolerant, at least,
and perhaps have advanced a step further in freethinking. One writer
has ventured to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, and to question the
necessity or utility of the Christian system, without being considered
universally as a monster, which would have been the case a few years
ago." [1548] She likewise noted that there was in Norway very little
of the fanaticism she had seen gaining ground, on Wesleyan lines,
in England. [1549] But though the Danes had "translated many German
works on education," they had "not adopted any of their plans";
there were few schools, and those not good. Norway, again, had been
kept without a university under Danish rule; and not until one was
established at Christiania in 1811 could Norwegian faculty play its
part in the intellectual life of Europe. The reaction, accordingly,
soon afterwards began to gain head. Already in 1790 "precautionary
measures" had been attempted against the press; [1550] and, these being
found inefficient, an edict was issued in 1799 enforcing penalties
against all anonymous writers--a plan which of course struck at
the publishers. But the great geographer, Malte-Brun, was exiled,
as were Heiberg, the dramatic poet, and others; and again there
was "a temporary stagnation in literature," which, however, soon
passed away in the nineteenth century. Meantime Sweden and Denmark
had alike contributed vitally to the progress of European science;
though neither had shared in the work of freethought as against dogma.
§ 3. The Slavonic States
1. In Poland, where, as we saw, Unitarian heresy had spread
considerably in the sixteenth century, positive atheism is heard of in
1688-89, when Count Liszinski (or Lyszczynski), among whose papers,
it was said, had been found the written statement that there is no
God, or that man had made God out of nothing, was denounced by the
bishops of Posen and Kioff, tried, and found guilty of denying not
only the existence of God but the doctrine of the Trinity and the
Virgin Birth. After being tortured, beheaded, and burned, his ashes
were scattered from a cannon. [1551] The first step was to tear out
his tongue, "with which he had been cruel towards God"; the next to
burn his hands at a slow fire. It is all told by Zulaski, the leading
Inquisitionist. [1552] But even had a less murderous treatment been
meted out to such heresy, anarchic Poland, ridden by Jesuits, was
in no state to develop a rationalistic literature. The old king,
John Sobieski, made no attempt to stop the execution, though he is
credited with a philosophical habit of mind, and with reprimanding
the clergy for not admitting modern philosophy in the universities
and schools. [1553]
2. In Russia the possibilities of modern freethought emerge only in
the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of Byzantine
barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-poesy,
partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry, tells of
the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the imposition
of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as the fourteenth
century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod, had held strongly
by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician and Lollard type;
[1554] but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general down to the age
of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we find the usual symptom
of criticism of the lives of the monks; [1555] but the culture was
almost wholly ecclesiastical; and in the seventeenth century the
effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681), to correct
the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox practices,
was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism. [1556]
He himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying
pictures and an organ in the manner of Savonarola; but his own
elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox, [1557]
though they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of
Peter. [1558] The priest Kriezanitch (1617-1678), who wrote a work on
"The Russian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth Century,"
denounced researches in physical science as "devilish heresies";
[1559] and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study
in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common
people. [1560] Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to
have remained convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science;
[1561] and the friends of the new light doubtless included deists
from the first. Not till the reforms of Peter had begun to bear
fruit, however, could freethought raise its head. The great Czar, who
promoted printing and literature as he did every other new activity
of a practical kind, took the singular step of actually withdrawing
writing materials from the monks, whose influence he held to be wholly
reactionary. [1562] In 1703 appeared the first Russian journal; and in
1724 Peter founded the first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it
the study of languages and the production of translations. Now began
the era of foreign culture and translations from the French. [1563]
Prince Kantemir, the satirist, who was with the Russian embassy in
London in 1733, pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic
tide, "the most civilized and enlightened of European nations." [1564]
The fact that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds
tells further of his liberalism. [1565] Gradually there arose a new
secular faction, under Western influences; and other forms of culture
slowly advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length,
in the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already
heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She
herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies;
[1566] she accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of
Church property; [1567] and she was long the admiring correspondent
of Voltaire, to whom and to D'Alembert and Diderot she offered warm
invitations to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she
specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it,
and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting
England, was there more of practical freedom than in Russia under her
rule; [1568] and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned
political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her
half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid
her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule
could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated classes;
though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was not till the
nineteenth century that original serious literature flourished.
§ 4. Italy
1. Returning to Italy, no longer the leader of European thought, but
still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century
the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail
thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless
misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella
vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy,
Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science
and the students of economics, only triflers, whose unbelief was of
a piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed,
mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under
the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce
had revived; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II
encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of Galileo
and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the end of
the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden and,
at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious; while, save for
the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of the
Marquis of Carpi, [1569] the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt
and intellectually superficial. [1570] Even in Naples, of course,
enlightenment was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that "there
are societies of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found
in any other place of Italy"; and he admits a general tendency of
intelligent Italians to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic
corruption. But at the same time he insists that, though the laity
speak with scorn of the clergy, "yet they are masters of the spirits
of the people." [1571] Yet it only needed the breathing time and the
improved conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century
to set up a wonderful intellectual revival.
2. First came the great work of Vico, the Principles of a New Science
(1725), whereof the originality and the depth--qualities in which,
despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu's Spirit
of Laws--place him among the great freethinkers in philosophy. It
was significant of much that Vico's book, while constantly using the
vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human development
in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is the note
of the whole eighteenth century in Italy. [1572] Vico posits Deity
and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of
civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured
his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and
condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from
that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico's formula any
validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go
with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other
nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been
barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so
much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so
vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to
renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure
Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography)
a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.
Signor Benedetto Croce, in his valuable work on Vico (The
Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Eng. tr. 1913, pp. 89-94), admits
that Vico is fundamentally at one with the Naturalists: "Like
them, in constructing his science of human society, he excludes
with Grotius all idea of God, and with Pufendorf considers man as
without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from
revealed religion and its God." Of Vico's opposition to Grotius,
Signor Croce offers two unsatisfactory explanations. First:
"Vico's opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed
confusion and obscurity, turns ... upon the actual conception
of religion.... Religion ... means for Vico not necessarily
revelation, but conception of reality." This reduces the defence
to a quibble; but finally Signor Croce asks himself "Why--if Vico
agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation,
and if he instead of it deepened their superficial immanental
doctrine--why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy
and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs
of having formulated a system of natural rights different from
that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman
Church." The natural suggestion of "politic caution" Signor
Croce rejects, declaring that "the spotless character of Vico
entirely precludes it; and we can only suppose that, lacking as
his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged
his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the
extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title
of Defensor Ecclesiæ at the very moment when he was destroying
the religion of the Church by means of humanity."
It is very doubtful whether this equivocal vindication is more
serviceable to Vico's fame than the plain avowal that a writer
placed as he was, in the Catholic world of 1720, could not be
expected to be straightforward upon such an issue. Vico comported
himself towards the Catholic Church very much as Descartes did. His
own declaration as to his motives is surely valid as against
a formula which combines "spotless character" with a cherished
"tendency to confusion." The familiar "tendency to hedge" is a
simpler conception.
3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the "New Science," as Vico boasted,
arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We might say
that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which elsewhere ran
to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy to take other
channels. By attacking a Protestant position which was really less
deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic currency for a
philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic theologians would have
scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico's sociology aroused on the one
hand new rationalistic speculation as to the origin of civilization,
and on the other orthodox protest on the score of its fundamentally
anti-Biblical character. It was thus attacked in 1749 by Damiano
Romano, and later by Finetti, a professor at Padua, àpropos of the
propaganda raised by Vico's followers as to the animal origin of
the human race. This began with Vico's disciple, Emmanuele Duni, a
professor at Rome, who published a series of sociological essays in
1763. Thenceforth for many years there raged, "under the eyes of Pope
and cardinals," an Italian debate between the Ferini and Antiferini,
the affirmers and deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter
of course taking up their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti
drew twenty-three objections to Vico. [1573] Duni found it prudent
to declare that he had "no intention of discussing the origin of
the world, still less that of the Hebrew nation, but solely that
of the Gentile nations"; but even when thus limited the debate
set up far-reaching disturbance. At this stage Italian sociology
doubtless owed something to Montesquieu and Rousseau; but the fact
remains that the Scienza Nuova was a book "truly Italian; Italian par
excellence." [1574] It was Vico, too, who led the way in the critical
handling of early Roman history, taken up later by Beaufort, and still
later by Niebuhr; and it was he who began the scientific analysis
of Homer, followed up later by F. A. Wolf. [1575] By a fortunate
coincidence, the papal chair was held at the middle of the century
(1740-1758) by the most learned, tolerant, and judicious of modern
popes, Benedict XIV, [1576] whose influence was used for political
peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy; and whom we shall find,
like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a freethinker. In the same age
Muratori and Giannone amassed their unequalled historical learning;
and a whole series of Italian writers broke new ground on the field
of social science, Italy having led the way in this as formerly in
philosophy and physics. [1577] The Hanoverian Dr. G. W. Alberti,
of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that "Italy is full of atheists";
[1578] and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according to capable
observers the effect of the French freethinking literature in the
past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany. [1579]
4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian writers
on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who
on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential
single book of the eighteenth century, [1580] the treatise on Crimes
and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better
throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist,
his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon
him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against
pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks, [1581] though he had sought
in his book to guard himself by occasionally "veiling the truth
in clouds." [1582] As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual
awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius--another
testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.
Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the
majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count
Algarotti (1712-1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the
group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per
le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the
Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan
abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in
the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate
Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769), the "redeemer of the Italian mind,"
[1583] and the chief establisher of economic science for modern
Italy. [1584] To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one
of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the
correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy
(1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799);
and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of
the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape,
was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748)
after twelve years' confinement.
To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary
testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli,
who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes [1585]
him: "My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy,
that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight
of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart
and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave,
when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more
reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the
soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well
as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but
employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to
frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short
and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a
preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti
must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should
I doubly be his friend and servant." [1586]
In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: "The Pope [Benedict XIV]
is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the
other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very
great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king
of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of
the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For
that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome,
and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied
unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told
me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There
is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a
sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at
Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great
use to religion if you would change their direction--viz. Yourself,
Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton
of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion." [1587]
Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer
of Newton [1588] and somewhat averse to religious zeal. [1589] Of
the papal government he admitted that it was favourable "neither
to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely
constitute the essence of public felicity," while suavely reminding
the Englishman of the "inconveniences" of his own government. [1590]
To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots,
he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy. [1591]
But Ganganelli's own thinking on the issues between reason and religion
was entirely commonplace. "Whatever," he wrote, "departs from the
account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to
support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone,
as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the
formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever
does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know
it." [1592] It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church
that his thinking was rationalistic. "The Pope," he writes to a French
marquis, "relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles
every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that
Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?" [1593]
At his death an Italian wrote of him that "the distinction he was
able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions
gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the
peace of the State." His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one
of his letters to Algarotti: "I hope that you will preach to me some
of these days, so that each may have his turn." [1594] Freethought
had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope,
could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have
the warm panegyric of Grimm. "If I have any vanity with which to
reproach myself," he writes, "it is that which I derive in spite of
myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of
the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and
Denis Diderot." [1595] Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best
qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that
would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.
Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage
of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century;
and in the names of Galvani and Volta stands the record of one more of
her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under Duke Leopold II
of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books put on the Index
were produced for him under the imprint of London; [1596] and the
papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of reform, Clement XIV
consenting among other things to abolish the Order of Jesuits (1773),
after his predecessor had died of grief over his proved impotence to
resist the secular policy of the States around him. [1597] In Tuscany,
indeed, the reaction against the French Revolution was instant and
severe. Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of Austria in
1790, but died in 1792; and in his realm, as was the case in Denmark
and in Spain in the same century, the reforms imposed from above
by a liberal sovereign were found to have left much traditionalism
untouched. After 1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father's
most liberal edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries; and in
1799, after the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out
of its one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for
"French opinions." [1598] Certainly some of the "French opinions" were
wild enough; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing alla
ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed about
1795 from France. [1599] As Quinet sums up, the revolution was too
strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbate Monti,
the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alternated his
strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances. [1600] Such was the dawn
of the new Italian day that has since slowly but steadily broadened,
albeit under many a cloud.
§ 5. Spain and Portugal
1. For the rest of Europe during the eighteenth century, we have
to note only traces of receptive thought. Spain under Bourbon rule,
as already noted, experienced an administrative renascence. Such men
as Count Aranda (1718-99) and Aszo y del Rio (1742-1814) wrought to
cut the claws of the Inquisition and to put down the Jesuits; but not
yet, after the long work of destruction accomplished by the Church in
the past, could Spain produce a fresh literature of any far-reaching
power. When Aranda was about to be appointed in 1766, his friends
the French Encyclopédistes prematurely proclaimed their exultation
in the reforms he was to accomplish; and he sadly protested that they
had thereby limited his possibilities. [1601] Nonetheless he wrought
much, the power of the Inquisition in Spain being already on the
wane. Dr. Joaquin Villanueva, one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who
took part in its suppression by the Cortes at Cadiz in 1813, tells how,
in his youth, under the reign of Charles III, it was a current saying
among the students at college that while the clever ones could rise to
important posts in the Church, or in the law, the blockheads would be
sure to find places in the Inquisition. [1602] It was of course still
powerful for social terrorism and minor persecution; but its power of
taking life was rapidly dwindling. Between 1746 and 1759 it had burned
only ten persons; from 1759 until 1781 it burned only four; thereafter
none, [1603] the last case having provoked protests which testified
to the moral change wrought in Europe by a generation of freethought.
In Spain too, as elsewhere, freethought had made way among the upper
classes; and in 1773 we find the Duke d'Alba (formerly Huescar),
ex-ambassador of Spain to France, subscribing eighty louis for a
statue to Voltaire. "Condemned to cultivate my reason in secret,"
he wrote to D'Alembert, "I see this opportunity to give a public
testimony of my gratitude to and admiration for the great man who
first showed me the way." [1604]
2. Still all freethinking in Spain ran immense risks, even under
Charles III. The Spanish admiral Solano was denounced by his almoner
to the Inquisition for having read Raynal, and had to demand pardon on
his knees of the Inquisition and God. [1605] Aranda himself was from
first to last four times arraigned before the Inquisition, [1606]
escaping only by his prestige and power. So eminent a personage as
P. A. J. Olavidès, known in France as the Count of Pilos (1726-1803),
could not thus escape. He had been appointed by Charles III prefect of
Seville, and had carried out for the king the great work of colonizing
the Sierra Morena, [1607] of which region he was governor. At the
height of his career, in 1776, he was arrested and imprisoned, "as
suspected of professing impious sentiments, particularly those of
Voltaire and Rousseau, with whom he had carried on a very intimate
correspondence." He had spoken unwarily to inhabitants of the new
towns under his jurisdiction concerning the exterior worship of deity
in Spain, the worship of images, the fast days, the cessation of work
on holy days, the offerings at mass, and all the rest of the apparatus
of popular Catholicism. [1608] Olavidès prudently confessed his error,
declaring that he had "never lost his inner faith." After two years'
detention he was forced to make his penance at a lesser auto da fé in
presence of sixty persons of distinction, many of whom were suspected
of holding similar opinions, and were thus grimly warned to keep
their counsel. During four hours the reading of his process went on,
and then came the sentence. He was condemned to pass eight years in
a convent; to be banished forever from Madrid, Seville, Cordova, and
the new towns of the Sierra Morena, and to lose all his property; he
was pronounced incapable henceforth of holding any public employment
or title of honour; and he was forbidden to mount a horse, to wear
any ornament of gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, or other precious
stones, or clothing of silk or fine linen. On hearing his sentence he
fainted. Afterwards, on his knees, he received absolution. Escaping
some time afterwards from his convent, he reached France. After
some years more, he cynically produced a work entitled The Gospel
Triumphant, or the Philosopher Converted, which availed to procure a
repeal of his sentence; and he returned into favour. [1609] In his
youth he "had not the talent to play the hypocrite." In the end he
mastered the art as few had done.
3. Another grandee, Don Christophe Ximenez de Gongora, Duke of
Almodobar, published a free and expurgated translation of Raynal's
History of the Indies under another title; [1610] and though he put
upon the book only an anagram of his name, he presented copies to the
king. The inquisitors, learning as much, denounced him as "suspected
of having embraced the systems of unbelieving philosophers"; but
this time the prosecution broke down for lack of evidence. [1611] A
similar escape was made by Don Joseph Nicholas d'Azara, who had been
minister of foreign affairs, minister plenipotentiary of the king at
Rome, and ambassador extraordinary at Paris, and was yet denounced at
Saragossa and Madrid as an "unbelieving philosopher." [1612] Count
Ricla, minister of war under Charles III, was similarly charged,
and similarly escaped for lack of proofs. [1613]
4. In another case, a freethinking priest skilfully anticipated
prosecution. Don Philip de Samaniego, "priest, archdeacon of Pampeluna,
chevalier of the order of St. James, counsellor of the king and
secretary-general, interpreter of foreign languages," was one of those
invited to assist at the auto da fé of Olavidès. The impression made
upon him was so strong that he speedily prepared with his own hand
a confession to the effect that he had read many forbidden books,
such as those of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Hobbes, Spinoza,
Montesquieu, Bayle, D'Alembert, and Diderot; and that he had been
thus led into skepticism; but that after serious reflection he had
resolved to attach himself firmly and forever to the Catholic faith,
and now begged to be absolved. The sentence was memorable. He was
ordered first to confirm his confession by oath; then to state how
and from whom he had obtained the prohibited books, where they now
were, with what persons he had talked on these matters, what persons
had either refuted or adopted his views, and which of those persons
had seemed to be aware of such doctrines in advance; such a detailed
statement being the condition of his absolution. Samaniego obeyed,
and produced a long declaration in which he incriminated nearly
every enlightened man at the court, naming Aranda, the Duke of
Almodobar, Ricla, and the minister Florida Blanca; also General
Ricardos, Count of Truillas, General Massones, Count of Montalvo,
ambassador at Paris and brother of the Duke of Sotomayor; and Counts
Campomanes, Orreilly, and Lascy. Proceedings were begun against one
and all; but the undertaking was too comprehensive, and the proofs
were avowed to be insufficient. [1614] What became of Samaniego,
history saith not. A namesake of his, Don Felix-Maria de Samaniego,
one of the leading men of letters of the reign of Charles IV, was
arraigned before the Inquisition of Logrogno as "suspected of having
embraced the errors of modern philosophers and read prohibited books,"
but contrived, through his friendship with the minister of justice,
to arrange the matter privately. [1615]
5. Out of a long series of other men of letters persecuted by the
Inquisition for giving signs of enlightenment, a few cases are
preserved by its historian, Llorente. Don Benedict Bails, professor
of mathematics at Madrid and author of a school-book on the subject,
was proceeded against in his old age, towards the end of the reign
of Charles III, as suspected of "atheism and materialism." He was
ingenuous enough to confess that he had "had doubts on the existence of
God and the immortality of the soul," but that after serious reflection
he was repentant and ready to abjure all his errors. He thus escaped,
after an imprisonment. Don Louis Cagnuelo, advocate, was forced to
abjure for having written against popular superstition and against
monks in his journal The Censor, and was forbidden to write in future
on any subject of religion or morals. F. P. Centeno, one of the leading
critics of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, was an Augustinian
monk; but his profession did not save him from the Inquisition when
he made enemies by his satirical criticisms, though he was patronized
by the minister Florida Blanca. To make quite sure, he was accused
at once of atheism and Lutheranism. He had in fact preached against
ceremonialism, and as censor he had deleted from a catechism for the
free schools of Madrid an article affirming the existence of the Limbo
of children who had died unbaptized. Despite a most learned defence,
he was condemned as "violently suspected of heresy" and forced to
abjure, whereafter he went mad and in that state died. [1616]
6. Another savant of the same period, Don Joseph de Clavijo y Faxardo,
director of the natural history collection at Madrid, was in turn
arraigned as having "adopted the anti-Christian principles of modern
philosophy." He had been the friend of Buffon and Voltaire at Paris,
had admirably translated Buffon's Natural History, with notes, and was
naturally something of a deist and materialist. Having the protection
of Aranda, he escaped with a secret penance and abjuration. [1617]
Don Thomas Iriarte, chief of the archives in the ministry of foreign
affairs, was likewise indicted towards the end of the reign of Charles
III, as "suspected of anti-Christian philosophy," and escaped with
similarly light punishment. [1618]
7. Still in the same reign, the Jesuit Francisco de Ista, author of an
extremely popular satire against absurd preachers, the History of the
famous preacher Fray Gerondif, published under the pseudonym of Don
Francisco Lobon de Salazar--a kind of ecclesiastical Don Quixote--so
infuriated the preaching monks that the Holy Office received "an
almost infinite number of denunciations of the book." Ista, however,
was a Jesuit, and escaped, through the influence of his order, with
a warning. [1619] Influence, indeed, could achieve almost anything in
the Holy Office, whether for culprits or against the uninculpable. In
1796, Don Raymond de Salas, a professor at Salamanca, was actually
prosecuted by the Inquisition of Madrid as being suspected of having
adopted the principles of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other modern
philosophers, he having read their works. The poor man proved that
he had done so only in order to refute them, and produced the theses
publicly maintained at Salamanca by his pupils as a result of his
teachings. The prosecution was a pure work of personal enmity on the
part of the Archbishop of Santiago (formerly bishop of Salamanca)
and others, and Salas was acquitted, with the statement that he was
entitled to reparation. Again and again did his enemies revive the
case, despite repeated acquittals, he being all the while in durance,
and at length he had to "abjure," and was banished the capital. After
a time the matter was forced on the attention of the Government,
with the result that even Charles IV was asked by his ministers to
ordain that henceforth the Inquisition should not arrest anyone without
prior intimation to the king. At this stage, however, the intriguing
archbishop successfully intervened, and the ancient machinery for
the stifling of thought remained intact for the time. [1620]
8. It is plain that the combined power of the Church, the orders,
and the Inquisition, even under Charles III, had been substantially
unimpaired, and rested on a broad foundation of popular fanaticism and
ignorance. The Inquisition attacked not merely freethought but heresy
of every kind, persecuting Jansenists and Molinists as of old it had
persecuted Lutherans, only with less power of murder. That much the
Bourbon kings and their ministers could accomplish, but no more. The
trouble was that the enlightened administration of Charles III in
Spain did not build up a valid popular education, the sole security
for durable rationalism. Its school policy, though not without zeal,
was undemocratic, and so left the priests in control of the mind of
the multitude; and throughout the reign the ecclesiastical revenues
had been allowed to increase greatly from private sources. [1621]
Like Leopold of Tuscany, he was in advance of his people, and imposed
his reforms from above. When, accordingly, the weak and pious Charles
IV succeeded in 1788, three of the anti-clerical Ministers of his
predecessor, including Aranda, were put under arrest, [1622] and
clericalism resumed full sway, to the extent even of vetoing the
study of moral philosophy in the universities. [1623] Mentally and
materially alike, Spain relapsed to her former state of indigence;
and the struggle for national existence against Napoleon helped rather
traditionalist sentiment than the spirit of innovation.
9. Portugal in the same period, despite the anti-clerical policy
of the famous Marquis of Pombal, made no noticeable intellectual
progress. Though that powerful statesman in 1761 abolished slavery
in the kingdom, [1624] he too failed to see the need for popular
education, while promoting that of the upper classes. [1625] His
expulsion of the Jesuits, accordingly, did but raise up against him
a new set of enemies in the shape of the Jacobeos, "the Blessed,"
a species of Catholic Puritan, who accused him of impiety. His
somewhat forensic defence [1626] leaves the impression that he was
in reality a deist; but though he fought the fanatics by imprisoning
the Bishop of Coimbra, their leader, and by causing Molière's Tartufe
to be translated and performed, he does not seem to have shown any
favour to the deistical literature of which the Bishop had composed
a local Index Expurgatorius. [1627] In Portugal, as later in Spain,
accordingly, a complete reaction set in with the death of the
enlightened king. Dom Joseph died in 1777, and Pombal was at once
disgraced and his enemies released, the pious Queen Maria and her
Ministers subjecting him to persecution for some years. In 1783,
the Queen, who became a religious maniac, and died insane, [1628]
is found establishing new nunneries, and so adding to one of the main
factors in the impoverishment, moral and financial, of Portugal.
§ 6. Switzerland
During the period we have been surveying, up to the French Revolution,
Switzerland, which owed much of new intellectual life to the influx of
French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, [1629]
exhibited no less than the other European countries the inability
of the traditionary creed to stand criticism. Calvinism by its very
rigour generated a reaction within its own special field; and the
spirit of the slain Servetus triumphed strangely over that of his
slayer. Genevan Calvinism, like that of the English Presbyterians,
was transmuted first into a modified Arminianism, then into "Arianism"
or Socinianism, then into the Unitarianism of modern times. In the
eighteenth century Switzerland contributed to the European movement
some names, of which by far the most famous is Rousseau; and the
potent presence of Voltaire cannot have failed to affect Swiss
culture. Before his period of influence, indeed, there had taken
place not a little silent evolution of a Unitarian and deistic kind;
Socinianism, as usual, leading the way. Among the families of Italian
Protestant refugees who helped to invigorate the life of Switzerland,
as French Protestants did later that of Germany, were the Turrettini,
of whom Francesco came to Geneva in the last quarter of the sixteenth
century. One of his sons, Benedict, made a professor at twenty-four,
became a leading theologian and preacher of orthodox Calvinism,
and distinguished himself as an opponent of Arminianism. [1630]
Still more distinguished in his day was Benedict's son François
(1623-1687), also a professor, who repeated his father's services,
political and controversial, to orthodoxy, and combated Socinianism,
as Benedict had done Arminianism. But François's son Jean-Alphonse,
also a professor (whose Latin work on Christian evidences, translated
into French by a colleague, we have seen adopted and adapted by
the Catholic authorities in France), became a virtual Unitarian
[1631] (1671-1737), and as such is still anathematized by Swiss
Calvinists. Against the deists, however, he was industrious, as his
grandfather, a heretic to Catholicism, had been against the Arminians,
and his father against the Socinians. The family evolution in some
degree typifies the theological process from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century; and the apologetics of Jean-Alphonse testify to
the vogue of critical deism among the educated class at Geneva in
the days of Voltaire's nonage. He (or his translator) deals with the
"natural" objections to the faith, cites approvingly Locke, Lardner,
and Clarke, and combats Woolston, but names no other English deist. The
heresy, therefore, would seem to be a domestic development from the
roots noted by Viret nearly two centuries before. One of Turrettini's
annotators complacently observes [1632] that though deists talk of
natural religion, none of them has ever written a book in exposition
of it, the task being left to the Christians. The writer must have
been aware, on the one hand, that any deist who in those days should
openly expound natural religion as against revealed would be liable to
execution for blasphemy in any European country save England, where,
as it happened, Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Tindal had all maintained the position, and on the other hand
he must have known that the Ethica of Spinoza was naturalistic. The
false taunt merely goes to prove that deists could maintain their
heresy on the Continent at that time without the support of books. But
soon after Turrettini's time they give literary indication of their
existence even in Switzerland; and in 1763 we find Voltaire sending
a package of copies of his treatise on Toleration by the hand of "a
young M. Turretin of Geneva," who "is worthy to see the brethren,
though he is the grandson of a celebrated priest of Baal. He is
reserved, but decided, as are most of the Genevese. Calvin begins
in our cantons to have no more credit than the pope." [1633] For
this fling there was a good deal of justification. When in 1763 the
Council of Geneva officially burned a pamphlet reprint of the Vicaire
Savoyard from Rousseau's Émile there was an immediate public protest
by "two hundred persons, among whom there were three priests"; [1634]
and some five weeks later "a hundred persons came for the third time to
protest.... They say that it is permissible to every citizen to write
what he will on religion; that he should not be condemned without a
hearing; and that the rights of men must be respected." [1635] All this
was not a sudden product of the freethinking influence of Voltaire and
Rousseau, which had but recently begun. An older leaven had long been
at work. The Principes du Droit Naturel of J. J. Burlamaqui (1748),
save for its subsumption of deity as the originator of all human
tendencies, is strictly naturalistic and utilitarian in its reasoning,
and clearly exhibits the influence of Hobbes and Mandeville. [1636]
Voltaire, too, in his correspondence, is found frequently speaking
with a wicked chuckle of the Unitarianism of the clergy of Geneva,
[1637] a theme on which D'Alembert had written openly in his article
Genève in the Encyclopédie in 1756. [1638] So early as 1757, Voltaire
roundly affirms that there are only a few Calvinists left: "tous les
honnêtes gens sont déistes par Christ." [1639] And when the younger
Salchi, professor at Lausanne, writes in 1759 that "deism is become
the fashionable religion.... Europe is inundated with the works of
deists; and their partisans have made perhaps more proselytes in the
space of eighty years than were made by the apostles and the first
Fathers of the Church," [1640] he must be held to testify in some
degree concerning Switzerland. The chief native service to intellectual
progress thus far, however, was rendered in the field of the natural
sciences, Swiss religious opinion being only passively liberalized,
mainly in a Unitarian direction.